The choppiness here may be recognizable, but that doesn’t mean it’s good story. A vision still on its way.
This year’s Flannery O’Connor winner offers a range of tales orbiting consistent pop-culture themes.
A sentiment from “A. Wonderland,” a modern retelling of the obvious, captures the spirit of Wells’s debut collection: “She knows he’s too old for Alice but feels sex with a much older man is a small price to pay for a good nonsense poem.” But Wells’s rejection of straightforward plot in favor of nonsense is ultimately hit and miss: the random feel of “Blue Skin” simulates the disconnectedness felt by brother and sister as they struggle to grow up motherless in a helter-skelter world; a man whose sole job is changing lightbulbs (“Godlight”) is intended to shed light, as it were, on life in an apocryphal hotel; “Sherman and the Swan” is a meandering tale of a boy born to the world as a marrow donor (too late) who comes to think the sister he failed may be reincarnated as the cygnet in his care; the most experimental piece is “Secession, XX,” with a side-by-side newspaper-column structure meant to simulate the physiology of Siamese twins (left side of page, girl; right side, boy) whose point of view is shared, to say the least. The experiment is conducted mainly to explore plain old pedestrian feelings, which is what any experimental fiction should ultimately be about. Unfortunately, Wells doesn’t always deliver on this mark. Too often, she relies on puns, double-entendres, and the general raucousness of modern product placement, which, even though it’s her subject, dates her and gives her work the cultural penetration of bell-bottom jeans. And even as one admires the ideas, one wishes they weren’t quite so cute—the reader longs for inspiration from the mind rather than the headlines.
The choppiness here may be recognizable, but that doesn’t mean it’s good story. A vision still on its way.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8203-2431-0
Page Count: 193
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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